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October 17, 1988. MOTIVATION, PERSONALITY ORGANIZATION, AND THE FOUR PSYCHOLOGIES OF PSYCHOANALYSIS. Fred Pine, Ph.D.
Dr. Pine advanced a view of motivation and personality organization derived from the "four psychologies"—drive, ego, object relations, and self-experience. He asked how motivations are born and how the personality becomes organized in the course of development. Drawing from empirical infant research, he proposed that there is an aspect of each of the four psychologies present from birth onward: a built-in prewired motivational tendency which undergoes developmental transformation, evolving into sustained, complex motives. He pointed out that in the domain of drive (both sexual and aggressive), we begin with biologically rooted urges which (a) become tied to specific objects and fantasies as those urges achieve cognitive representation and elaboration over time; (b) come to operate in relation to self-experience, ego functioning, and object relations; and (c) in the case of aggression, come to include reactive forms which achieve ongoing status as the capacity to hold the offending other in mind matures (object constancy). For the domain of the ego, Dr. Pine outlined the prewired tendencies toward elementary attunement, tension regulation, and adaptedness; he suggested that they evolve into a varyingly rigid, but never fully flexible tendency to maintain the achieved mode of organization in an effort to avoid negative affect. In the domain of object relations, there is a primal readiness for connection to the other, which then evolves into the tendency to repeat old, now internalized object relations in the effort to master the "strain" traumata associated with them. In the area of self-experience, we begin with a homeostatic tendency to ameliorate subjective discomfort (the infant's cry when hungry), proceed through the development of familiar subjective states of self (self-constancy), and then evolve a tendency to maintain that familiar sel